@@ballinbalgruuf8198 Shrouded Hand is a youtuber that uploads videos of various human atrocities as well as supernatural stuff. In short, a horror channel, but be prepared to feel depressed or motivated to become the gavel of justice after almost every video.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if every single one of those assets is purchased from the Unity Engine store or similar. They fit pretty well so they'd have to be part of a pack though. Like there's what, a dozen or couple dozen environmental assets shown throughout the palace sections in the video? Meanwhile Unreal Engine 5 is coming out with hundreds of high-quality free assets bundled with it.
@@fnhatic6694 If you think this game with uniquely original gameplay is an asset-flip, you don't understand what the term means. Not to mention multiple voice actors...
It never clearly explains to you the ACTUAL way the repeat mechanic works. It records your actions when it's lit, then goes black, and now the DG's will adopt those actions. BUT, they forget those same actions during the next cycle. However, a cycle will only occur once enough actions have been taken. So the ideal strategy is legit, do your best to stealth while lit, only taking rash actions when you absolutely have to, black out, go guns blazing and try to get as much done. Repeat. But I legit had to Google/Wiki it back when I played because I too had NO idea and was just getting increasingly frustrated.
That was all very clearly explained by the time you leave the introductory levels. There is a part where En notices the echoes can't walk through water, then you walk through water, then next cycle they can walk through water. In the next level, they can't walk through water again, and En literally says something like "they also *unlearn* things that I don't do" to London.
@@williammanning7207 you missed the point of his comment He wanst talking that the game doesnt explain the learn vs unlearn mechanics What he was pointing out is how the blackouts are not in a timer but are tied to the actions you take wich the game doesnt explain
This game's story is an english teacher's dream. The enemy is yourself, the dialogue is verbose yet vague, and the main characters overanalyze an inanimate object!
Upon careful examination of this post I have reached the conclusion that I channel strong English professor vibes. Coincidentally, I found Echo to be a thoroughly enjoyable game and its story was, whilst not superb, adequate.
Hey, before I went to rehab, I might have found this a really evocative metaphor for my life. You know, you manage to solve some of your problems, but then a black-out happens, and suddenly you have a bunch more problems again.
Depends imo. Having your screen go black too much can be immersion breaking... not having anything to focus your eyes on can remind you that youre looking at a screen. Also, its a really bad idea to have those bright rooms and then go black. That contrast is eye strain inducing.
Or at least have some warning it is going to happen. Like her going; "No... not again." As lights start to slowly dim. Or give limited amount of items to stave it off.
Whenever I feel sad or wanna go to bed I put on Ross's Game Dungeon. The tangents and reviews and common sense approach to analysis really just makes me feel a little less insane. Thanks dude your an hero!
00:00 Intro. 00:53 Main menu. 01:22 Start of the game. 04:22 Landing and Icy Gieger Tech part. 06:27 "why don't we shoot it" part and rant about UE4 stability. 07:17 The Palace love moment. 11:32 Flickering lights and blackout rant #1 12:24 Copies mechanics and main gameplay loop explained. 20:35 Blackout rant #2 23:22 Lore reveal #1 (obvious Ross's cults segway), also plot delivery rant. 27:45 Music in the game. 29:10 Soul cube love moment, also soul cubes rating part. 31:23 Losing the cube, plot twist #1 reveal. 33:21 Gold level love moment, also antialiasing rant. 36:10 Plot twist #2 reveal and story rant. 38:15 Game ending. 39:13 Ross's story rant #2 40:07 Conclusion. Possible solutions for fixing the game. 42:30 Credits.
@@benbot0733 No, he started giving awards 2-3 episodes into this and has been doing it for every single game up until 2 episodes ago. I actually remember even the first episodes had "awards" but he was like "I give this game a rating of 3 reeses peanut butter cups" or something
That's why I'm so disappointed with the direction games are going, shooting for better and better graphics but never optimizing or improving anything else. Imagine what game systems or AI would be like if the industry was competing over those. Games have become increasingly stagnant over time.
@@unknownuser3926 At the same time, I also hate people forcing developers to have a stylized artstyle that's opposite to their vision. I can stand ANY type of graphics. Retro, stylized, gritty, realistic, cartoony, anything to be honest for as long as it's their vision and not because they were forced because this is trending or this is what the audience or the fans want. Yeah, they definitely need to optimize their games and improve things that need to be improved on their Game Engine. I may expect some games that have those problems to run well in like a decade unless it's Engine related, but that's just me. However, these problems are getting too complicated that the audience and gamers do not nor fully understand or don't really like to understand.
I feel like this game would have been much better had they added 1 simple feature--places where you can stash the cube safely, thus making the enemies not attack you. Make it so you can only accomplish the objectives with the cube in hand, but you're giving the player the option to map out the level first. It helps turn it into much more of a tactics and puzzle game (I'll go through this door and jump this gap, but walk around the water so that once the blackout hits I can cross the water to escape), and also helps out the pacing issues by giving the player some breathing room in places. If you standardize enemy locations between cycles and give the player some ability to trigger when the blackouts happen (levers to interact with mid-level maybe?) and then you have an interesting and really novel puzzle game that would be worth checking out.
I thought they'd be doing the exact same thing. Also, making the frequency of the blackouts RANDOM was just abysmally stupid idea, turning any opportunity to use their core mechanic in a sensible way into tossing dice and hoping for the best.
@@TheRenofox nah, the blackouts arent random, its much worse - the blackout comes faster if you kill echoes or make recordeable moves, further punishing the player for doing literally anything
@@bukvaQ Sometimes people have a really stupid idea what sounds good on paper. They just don't think it further and try to figure it out how it would work in a computer game.
@@michimatsch5862 it's not based on time at all, but on actions. The game gives you a bunch of useless actions to perform (such as playing the piano or hitting a tuning fork) so you can manually speed it up. I think the game requires you to do at least a few useful actions to trigger a blackout, so as to avoid you just making the AI completely useless every third cycle (I don't think Ross mentioned this, but the palace doesn't remember skills forever, only for the next two cycles after seeing you do it). It's genuinely nowhere near as bad as Ross describes it. You have about ten things you can do to completely protect yourself from the echoes, you just need to make sure you don't teach them all your skills at the same time.
My favorite thing about this game is that it introduced me to the concept of basically space elves reimagined as smug AI that are smug because they live for thousands of years during warpless space travel. I find it clever.
@@gestaltengine6369 Also, En looks like a miserable goth. In "BLAME!" everyone looks like a miserable goth, especially the cyborgs… The designers of Echo might have taken inspiration from "BLAME!" but the author of "BLAME!" took inspiration from Hellraiser's Cenobites. Incidentally, Kentaro Miura took inspiration from Hellraiser lwhen he created the miserable goth looking God Hand.
Wasn't expecting this! Tried Running Echo a couple years back and it turned my GPU into a Jet Engine. I genuinely thought it was gonna set my Tower on Fire so I never went back to it. No other game on UE4, let alone any game in general, has done something like that.
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 Lol no, my Overclocking days are far behind me, not since I fried 3 prior GPU's in my teens. Can't afford that now that I am living in my own apartment.
@@flippedoutkyrii Just saying, if you have an RTX card, MSI Afterburner has an automatic OC utility now. Won't hit the same highs, but it's super unlikely to break anything.
"People like this aren't bad, but they're just going to waste your time, because all they do is introspect, even though they're making all this up as they go." I feel attacked.
I can see a really cool alternative method to the black-out/doppelganger gimmick: no blackouts, but a quick warning before a random shift in colored lighting in the Palace. And for each color, the doppelgangers exhibit a different behavior. Maybe either just different levels of speed/aggression for each color, OR they remember certain behaviors they learn from the player per color. So if it's green when you vault over obstacles, they'll only do that when it's green again. And the colors are either randomized or have an elaborate pattern the player might be able to recognize like in the movie Cube. Or something, I dunno. I see lots of room for more interesting twists on the premise, as it's a really interesting idea having the enemies learn your behaviors between cycles so the player has to keep track of not only the enemies but themself. I dunno how that'd solve the infinite respawn problem though. It seems like the devs were really trying to Do Something with this game, but it ended up like this for whatever myriad reasons I'm sure there are. Awesome vid as always Ross!
You can easily kill the clones, without triggering a blackout. At one point I killed every clone in a level at the same time. 1. The game has a shove function that eats regenerating stamina. The game also has a melee action, to free yourself from a clone's grasp if you're caught, that eats a separate regenerating stamina from the shove. Both actions eat the same amount of stamina and thus take the same amount of time to replenish. Thus, you can juggle between a shove and a melee indefinitely, because the stamina for one will regenerate while you're using the other. 2. Clones always die if they go over a railing. Doesn't matter how low a railing and it doesn't matter what's on the other side of the railing, it just needs to be a railing. So, just walk up to a clone and shove it, then start jogging towards a railing. When the clone eventually catches up to you, use a melee to get it off your back, then go back to jogging towards the railing. When the clone catches up to you again, your shove will be ready, so just shove it again. Keep doing this until you reach a railing. When you get to a railing, start running as close to the railing as you can, so that the clone does the same. Stop and either shove or melee the clone. Once that is done, reposition yourself so the clone is now between you and the railing. As soon as the clone recovers after the shove/melee, simply shove it over and job's done. Clone is now dead, but the game never registers this as a death so it never blacks out and it never lets the clones learn from this.
Reminds me of trick speedrunners use to do accidents in Hitman:BM, when they just push target over the railing, no matter how high it has to fall, it always count as accidental elimination.
4:50 that annoying questioning and aggressive attitude about not liking things was my entire set of colleagues in university. They met everything they didnt understand with this angsty questioning and straight up deny something could ostensibly exist or be possible because they dont understand it. And they get resentful as hell if you bring them around to understanding if they made that initial knee-jerk move and then shortly after ate shit. The university education system was even tailored to this sort of annoying thought process and i had to think like one of these annoying people to get through the classes.
Where's the awards for this game? That's one of the best parts of your reviews, Ross! I made some mock-ups of what I feel were fitting: 1st Award - Archeology Dreamhouse. If you wanted to explore a beautiful, opulent infinite palace full of great decorations and designs, then I can't think of something better. It's sort of like the mansions from Black Mirror, just a different style and taken to a more supernatural extreme. 2nd Award - Faulty Lightswitch. The light/dark cycles of this game are easily the most annoying part. Hard to enjoy the game like this, where every minute you're just getting cut off so it can- 3rd Award - Doesn't Respect Your Time. Between the slowing the player down for conversations, the respawning enemies that impede progress, and dying over and over making you restart; the game is just a timesink.
Potential 4th Award - Kiddie Pool Plot. It wants to seem deep and complex and cool like the ocean, but it's just sitting in the backyard with a hose pouring water into a shallow tub.
I love it for the same reason Ross mentioned. It just looks like an abstract dream that seems perfectly normal to you until you wake up. We need more games with enviroments like that.
Having never heard of this game, it seems like a tech demo that someone decided to flesh out after a positive reception to their proof-of-concept. Couldn't agree more as far as making the player walk slowly during playable story segments. Not a fan at all of how that particular quirk caught on among certain developers. I get that they don't want to break up the gameplay and then they describe it as "immersive" but just having a skippable cutscene would be a huge improvement over handicapping the player to listen to dialogue for a story they may not care about.
It would be better if they spent more time planning so the story part would be the same length as atleast the average speed, I don't like it but I can excuse it disableing run, but this game it makes you go the slowest speed and thats what makes it annoying.
It's not like there are enemies, just let me walk normally while i listen to the story. And there are ways to make the player want to slow down instead of forcing them.
I would like to say that they think this is more "cinematic", but I don't recall many movies where a character is leisurely strolling around talking to a disembodied voice.
there has to be term for slowing down movement but, I call it like yank the chain, or maybe The dog walk. I see this alot and I can't not think this isn't codifed.
For a game made by a bunch of students as their graduation project Echo really looks and plays good. The idea that your actions make your future worse and worse really makes this horror real.
re: genetic requirements: i played this briefly after reading nihei's "blame!" (pronounced blam, incidentally, because japan), where the protagonist's main quest in to find humans with the "terminal gene" (as in command line, not final), that can access the network that runs the world. so i automatically assumed it was this sort of genetical engineering, she needed to have certain genes to be able to access the palace
Yeh, that was my thought as well, considering shes obviously not some super soldier. Its a common trope to have some genetic key. Heck, Ciri in the Witcher, for example, has a specific combination of genes bred into her to unlock her abilities.
Weird! I found this game shortly after reading BLAME! Too... thought it was a weird coincidence that there was so much media based on mysterious and dizzyingly infinite architecture.
Custom awards time: WORST CLONES EVER Cloning in general is often a crapshoot. Sometimes they're chill and sometimes they want you dead. On very few occasions will you end up with hundreds of clones who all want you dead, come back to life after being killed, and get better at killing you the more you try to escape them. As cloning goes, this is close to the worst possible scenario. BUDGET WHERE IT COUNTS This game didn't have the most highly detailed main character, flashy cutscenes, or a wealth of different enemy types. They spent all their money on the level design, and that was the winning proposition. MOST SPITEFUL AI You might think this award would go to AM from I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, but his thing was all about hatred. He exterminated all but five humans, and put those through unimaginable torture. London has to help you, but he makes sure to whine and bitch every step of the way, making the journey as miserable as possible. That's true spite right there.
AM is THE cream of the crop for spiteful AI london is just a whiney powerless bitch, oh sure he can deactivate the gun but that is nothing compared. Dear god man have you read the horrors AM inflicts?
25:35, this kind of problem absolutely permeates a lot of high budget games these days. At a certain point, the exposition should just be relegated to a cutscene. Since it is technically gameplay and cant be skipped, it makes the player dread doing repeat playthroughs.
I feel like 'games that should be good/enjoyable but aren't for xyz reasons' is whole new genre Ross just cracked open and i cant wait for more. We love you, never stop making these
"We're off to a weird start here." And this is why I'm always excited for that rare instance you post a NEW Game Dungeon episode! My favorite soul cube was the Omnicube from Bomberman 64. Nobody even knows what specifically it DOES! It's some kind of MacGuffin is all I got out of it.
Spot on about the slow-walking thing. It's infuriating when it can't be skipped at all. Moving slow and taking in the sights/story should ALWAYS be up to the player, now matter how "artistic" your game is supposed to be.
This game feels like what happens when an art designer lies about their credentials to get a job as a game designer, has a large budget and, a really good team that is able to bring their vision to life, but has never done any actual game design in their life before. It has beautiful aesthetics and visuals, and that's about it.
@@Brunosky_Inc You can at least google Balan Wonderworld. Echo has such a generic title that you can't even do that, not helped by there being a comic and a visual novel by that same name, as well as several other non-mononym games with echo in their title. This game's name is like if an indie studio named their game 'Sonic', on the offchance that it'll appear when you google the game's name, only to be utter drowned out by other more relevent sonic search results. This game is kind of a failing on every non-aesthetic level.
@@Detahramet DARK - the computer game :) Sometimes it's okay, for example you call a game FIRE and the game is about a prehistoric man fighting for survival in a world where still not everybody know fire and the title also means "fire in the soul" what makes us human, generic title with meaning but still borderline simplistic. In the other hand you name a game like: Zone Savage or Glorious Mess or shit like this and you have a good start.
Sad thing is people can't understand game development is not just about coding or in this case painting, you have to understand games too, and there are many people out there who do understand games, and we living in the information age, basically these people have the option to look for talented people right where they are, in front of their computer.
The story of the game strikes me as the epilogue to an epic journey. The game assumes we know the characters and their relations and motivations. The ending itself looks like the completion to the character arc of En. Maybe it is a transmedia narrative. Like the Halo books, comics and the erotic novels that explain the story of Master Chief, Cortana and the other guys.
It feels really weird to have a game that is super out there like this, yet a basic summay of the mechanics and one trailer is enough to let you know exactly how the game is goig to play out from beginning to end
@@sidewinder2716 This could just be that the mechanics aren't explained very well or not at all, I'm personally fine with him talking about his experience, but then there could also be times where mechanics are well-explained, told or demonstrated that he just missed.
@@sidewinder2716 call me a fanboy or something, but that's part of the charm imo. It's either really insightful, with tons of good ideas, or hilarious with how much he missed. Then again, I generally don't play a huge amount of the games Ross plays, so the likelihood of me noticing if he does something silly is pretty slim, but that's on me. I just enjoy the silly youtube man.
00:00 Intro. 00:53 Main menu. 01:22 Start of the game. 04:22 Landing and Icy Gieger Tech part. 06:27 "why don't we shoot it" part and rant about UE4 stability. 07:17 The Palace love moment. 11:32 Flickering lights and blackout rant #1 12:24 Copies mechanics and main gameplay loop explained. 20:35 Blackout rant #2 23:22 Lore reveal #1 (obvious Ross's cults segway), also plot delivery rant. 27:45 Music in the game. 29:10 Soul cube love moment, also soul cubes rating part. 31:23 Losing the cube, plot twist #1 reveal. 33:21 Gold level love moment, also antialiasing rant. 36:10 Plot twist #2 reveal and story rant. 38:15 Game ending. 39:13 Ross's story rant #2 40:07 Conclusion. Possible solutions for fixing the game. 42:30 Credits.
Dude. You are one of the best down to earth, every-man-style video maker I have ever seen. You're both funny and insightful and every time I drift away and do other things (live life, accomplish things) I will stumble across another one of your videos and am again, memorized by your thoughts and running commentary. Thank you.
The gold level reminds me of the Orokin areas in Warframe a lot. Those have a lot more white and sometimes a bit of cyan blue (and a lot more enemies), but the gold is there.
Maybe that's what the message of this game was: Sacrifice yourself (make videos non-stop) for strangers you don't know (the viewers), and once you've burnt yourself out, the strangers wake up and realize the error of their ways, but its too late, they're in an endless space palace with no escape now (The internet).
I remember reviewing this game when it first came out. I really loved the atmosphere and story, though I wasn't great at getting through certain parts without either a minimap or enemy vision.
The end credits music from Rama threw me off since you already used that for the end credits of the actual Rama review; I've rewatched that video more times than I care to count.
I loved this game. Something about it was just so engaging. Constantly being encouraged to use minimal possible force as much as you can so that the clones don't become more lethal in the next cycle
really looks like a game where you could get rid of the enemies and make the infinite palace the enemy, like having parts reorient itself when the blackouts hit, also make the player more nimble
The enemies learn from what you do only while there is light and only for one cycle: you can shoot them while it's dark or avoid shooting them for one cycle and they'll forget how to shoot
I forgot about Echo! It was an interesting experience to be sure. Also, Ross there is a pretty famous character just named N from Pokémon Black and White along with the sequels. I think he might have a real name but I don’t recall the games mentioning it.
The architecture of the Palace both frightened and intrigued me. Shit, the entire aesthetic of the game captivated me the fist time I saw it, which is one of the reasons why I come back to it whenever the feeling returns. A dream in one moment, and a nightmare in the next.
You know it's a Game Dungeon video when Ross goes into heavy detail on the various "soul cubes" in other video games and films and explains whether or not they're mysterious, whether or not they use souls, and whether or not each one qualifies cube.
This is genuinely one of the best looking games I've ever seen. Not in terms of graphics quality or detail, but its environments are breath taking. Damn.
Just lately found the channel and it is quickly becoming a favorite. Love having these on in the background while I work. Great stuff man. Very happy I found you.
This is so bizarre. Half way through the episode I remembered reading about this game in a magazine but if it was released in 2017 I mean... that's well beyond magazine times so maybe it was in development hell for like a decade? I mean if you started trying to build a concept like that with architecture that epic I can see it being a damned difficult feat a decade ago.
Technically not beyond magazine times -- if it went through a normal game cycle, you'd probably have read it in 2015/2016, and some games magazines are still releasing physical copies to this day.
Great video. One thing that stood out to me though, is that you disabled the UI ring at the start. Then afterwards you mention that you aren't that good at stealth games and you felt the game wasn't accomodating stealth gameplay. I think you dropped the ball on that one. The UI ring definitely helps alot in determining both the direction and state of awareness of nearby clones. Besides that minor point I really enjoyed the video. Thank you
And with higher and higher resolutions coming, pixel size will get so small we don't need anti-aliasing before they ever manage to start doing it well.
My inner weeb got really excited when I saw you list L from Death Note on your letter-for-name roster. That inner weeb wants to mention that there's a character named "N" in Pokemon.
I think a certain basic level of stealth gameplay skill really changes the flow of Echo. Being fully stealthy doesn't end up happening, but being able to solve a guard or two or a room before everything goes to hell really helps calibrate the blackout-cycle gameplay. Then it starts to become far more puzzle-like, with management of the available chase-breakers (doors, elevators, waist-high walls, water, even running), making sure you don't give the enemy too many for the next cycle, while using the ones only you have during the current cycle to trivially lose any pursuers. Also, I would remark that killing the enemies might have actually been a major mistake. Non-lethal solutions leave the guards where you put them, with a little finagling you could even trap them in rooms they couldn't leave if you didn't give them the right skills. Even without trying to actively wrangle them, the nature of being spotted and pursued should lead to enemies being dragged more towards places you've already been, which is wonderful if you want to go to places where you haven't been. Kill them and suddenly they're back to where they were, which is exactly where you don't want them. Finally: you wake up from blackouts with about a 2 second head start before the enemies become at all aware. Plenty of time to get a free choke-out on the one that was chasing you last time, or disengage if there was more than one. Really led to me appreciating the blackouts, and even being more active at doing recordable things because I think that influenced the cycle timer.
I ran this in 2017 on a 4k monitor, no antialiasing, on a brand new 1080Ti and it was a console masterpiece. It really do have that many pixels, and that game definitely hit above its weight class for what capable hardware there was at the time.
There was a part where you had to sit on a chair and run for a door but many doppelgangers rush you from the door you're supposed to go to. I couldn't get past that point. By that time, the gimmick had ran out as well, and I stopped. EDIT: 31:06 yeah... that bit.
Ah I remember seeing this game a while back and thinking the concept sounds interesting, but had a feeling it wouldn't work that great in practice and passed over it.
17:55 jokes on you its pretty simple to outsmart this game: - you can do anything you want during the blackouts without them copying you - echos you take out during the blackout dont respawn in the next rotation - the echos aggro resets on blackout meaning you can walk behind them and strangle them if they are close to u after immediately after the blackout - you trigger the blackout by using x ammount of abilities the game gives you relatively simple routes you can walk through towards your objectives to sum this up into a strategy: crouching manteling and sprinting as well as piking up objects or interacting with the environment are used to trigger the blackout, while in the light stay sneaky and take out a couple of the echos, once the blackout process starts, use your gun and sprint as well as those white balls to progress as fast as possible and find a good hiding spot before the reset. Also keep those white orbs on your as often as you can, they are a good panic button and cant be used as well as the gun by the echos. There should also always be a way to stay away from areas with 3 or more echos close together, most intended progression routes only have 2 or 3 of them in the smaller side rooms. As for objectives surrounded by water, your goal is it to get to the objective during a blackout so they dont have the ability to walk through water in the next rotation, then get the objective and in the next rotation use the water to escape since it doesnt matter if they know how water works after your gone. shooting is always bad! only use the gun during blackouts bc the two main problems are solved with the blackout: - they dont learn to shoot - their aggro resets so they forget that they heard a shot If you are getting chased by an echo, push it and circle around something like a vase or table, thats usually enough to get behind them if you cant and your close to a black out, bait them until reset and run behind them while they are in their "respawn" animation. Im sorry I kinda skipped through your vid so no clue if you mentioned it but you also have a ping tool added to your sphere so you can see enemies that are close to you. usually most echos get to a point where they can safely be taken out without another one seeing you somewhere along their pathing. there is also a calling funktion to bait echos. during blackouts or in tight situations you can always use stuff like doors and elevators to get them away from you (there is also that shockwave gun ability but i never had to resort to that). once the save arches are introduced they also show up on your ping, they act as a more primary target as youll finish whatever objective you have to complete while moving from save arch to save arch. I kinda feel like too many people say this game is "stupid" or too unfair and difficult just bc they didnt pick up on all the mechanics bc its really more of a puzzle game then a stealth game. It seems that some people just dont really pick up on the intended way of playing it (wich i guess is the devs fault) even tho to me it was relatively obvious to me (and Im kinda stupid myself). I hope you maybe give this game another chance and try out some of the levels with these tips, if you still feel like its unfair I guess its just not your kind of game. As for me I genuinely had fun with the game and thought of it as a really unique and well executed mechanic (although I dont wanna know about hard difficulty). oh and just as an info the devs for echo dissolved in 2019(?) wich is really sad bc I wanted to see more games like Echo. Its nice to see reviews like yours tho bc you did say that people that are good at stealth might enjoy this game a whole lot more
I liked the gameplay, its very much a divisive game. A game that took risks and paid the price with the devs being dissolved. I also really liked that it was sci-fi outside of the usual sci-fi affaire. Also since it wasnt mentioned, to anyone that is interested in this game also check out Magnetic Rose. Its an OVA thats part of the Memories collection (1995), and its what inspired the setting.
It feels like Ross misunderstood how he was meant to play the game, went through the whole game like that, and then thought the game sucked. Not that the game isn't at fault for failing to teach him, but still; he is literally going into a game with a huge focus on stealth, running around openly in front of all the enemies, and then complaining that there's constantly enemies chasing him around.
I was very curious about this game, everything Ross showed seemed SUPER interesting and it was disappointing to hear about the gameplay being so lack luster. After watching a LP though? The gameplay seems, really, really interesting.The echos do learn from what you do but I don't recall Ross talking about it but, they also unlearn what you do. The revolving gameplay mechanic is: Anything you do during the day? The echos can learn and mimic you the next cycle. Anything you do in the dark? The echos don't learn. The next day they'll be able to do what you taught them. But the NEXT cycle they'll unlearn it. Also, the cycles are based on what you do. If you don't move and try not to teach them anything? The game will not progress the cycle, for every action you teach them the timer seems to go down. And they'll learn anything from crouch-walking to vaulting, opening doors, extending bridges, sitting on the thrones, walking through water, shooting, sprinting, carrying orbs that can kill & using them. Heck, you might be able to teach them to eat the grapes and see if you can get them to eat the inedible ones to kill them. So it's a risk vs reward system. The gun is INCREDIBLY powerful, able to kill as many enemies in a row as are lined up. But if you do it during the day? Yeah they shoot at you. But if you do it at night, they don't learn it and you can shoot a bunch of them with 1 shot, sprint to your objective and such. So you don't have to walk everywhere or not shoot, you just have to weigh what you want to do given the situation.
Thanks once more for showing us these hidden gems Ross, old and new. I had no clue It existed, so it looks they y took a cut on the marketing. If only they had half the passion for gameplay testing as they have for lush Escher-style palaces, it could be a nish legend.
Boy that bit about the mirror guy in Prince of Persia took me back some. I remember as I kid I used to have dreams about the mirror guy and essentially mirror worlds. I used to think that maybe we can't climb through mirrors is because our mirror selves was pushing back, you know because if you push on a mirror your hand and your mirror images hand pressed against each other. I used to spend hours daydreaming about mirror land and the entire concept of mirror people just because of that small little thing they did in an old-ass Dos game.
I love your videos Ross, I've been watching you ever since I was like 8 with my dad, we used to watch freemans mind together. Thank you for all the years of laughs.
In a Peter F Hamilton novel there are people that spread a single consciousness across multiple bodies. Not a collective consciousness, but an individual who is simultaneously existing in multiple brains at a time. It was really cool because it seems like the ultimate way to live. The guy had a few of his bodies that had jobs to pay for the rest of himself to do whatever. He'd be at home playing video games in one body while another was out partying etc. And if a body has an accident somewhere and dies it doesn't matter, nothing is lost.
I don't know Ross, after having played the game for around 2:30 hours myself (I'm around the green palace area now) I found the stealth and enemy learning mechanics quite engaging and enjoyable. I really like toying around with the AI, seeing what they would learn and how they would implements my actions. That being said I can easily see why some would not, it's a very slow and methodical game, most of the time you need to move slowly and plan around what you are willing to risk teaching the AI the for the next Blackout.
Pokemon has a character named N if you're still shopping for that slot. Pretty prominent little dude to, questions the entire premise of "dogfighting with monsters," that the franchise has going on. Spends his game as essentially your main antagonist/rival figure while the real big bad manipulates him.
I forgot to leave a comment for the YT-algorithm. This video deserves more views, but so do the rest of your content too. Life is unfair - luckily it's short.
This looked and seemed amazing until the clones showed up. And then the story ended up being boring 2deep4u stuff, and I normally like this kind of story but this just seemed so thin.
There is a game called Naissance which seems similar in feel to the beginning of Echo. The difference is that it replaces unfeeling baroque architecture with unfeeling industrial architecture. In any case, both Echo and Naissance seem to be taking cues from Blame! manga.
@@innoclarke7435 There's a way to kill everything, without triggering a reset. Once you figure out how to do that, the game actually starts to feel more like a slasher flick, where you lure unsuspecting victims away from their friends, to then never be seen again.
> what genetic traits you should need to exlore an abandoned space palace? I can be an explorer too. > Thirty minutes later: OH NO MY GOD THEY'RE COMING FOR ME ARRRGHHH apparently being fluid, not counting on your last method working again and being able to solve problems on the fly all are traits that Resourceful cultist should posess.
Wow, I had not made that connection but yeah the endless building and unknowable machines trying to kill everyone while a lone figure tries to survive definitely has some Blame! vibes. The gun too. I was just watching a video on liminal spaces and The Backroom and they brought up Blame! Which made me think of this game and the infinite architecture.
Damn dark places in games where you can't see anything is one of my biggest pet peeves. Some artist spent weeks modelling everything but you can't see it because "the lights are off." If I had wanted to not see the damn game I am playing I'd try playing it with my monitor off.
Man... I don't know about anyone else, but everything about that story is a gigantic letdown to me. There was so much cool stuff you could do with literally fighting yourself. Could have a lot of psychological and introspective significance. Instead it's about reviving a cube dad. Just... geez.
hell they don't even seem to have an actua explanation for what's going on with the clones and palace and stuff beyond some random theory the protag voices that....has no actual evidence to it.
There's a Kingdom Hearts game that does that. It was meant to be a tutorial for KH3 but ended up being its own little thing. Without spoiling too much, you play as a woman descending into suicidal depression as her negative thoughts play in the background, and she fights herself several times. There's even an infinite palace thing like at 9:10. The bleak feeling is definitely intensified by the total lack of any non-hostile NPCs and the setting of destroyed Disney settings floating in a black void.
I remember seeing the trailer for this game and being really excited for it. This explains why I never heard anything about it afterwards :/ Major props for powering through this, though, it’s gorgeous despite its many flaws.
It wouldnt be a Ross video if he didnt go off on some tangent about some deep philosophical shit or anti-aliasing
It wouldnt be youtube if I would not upvote a comment made by a random verified account
hellow shrouded hand, everybody here (love your videos)
it seems like youtubers of all paths converge at the game dungeon
Philosophy and anti-aliasing; They are one and the same.
@@ballinbalgruuf8198 Shrouded Hand is a youtuber that uploads videos of various human atrocities as well as supernatural stuff. In short, a horror channel, but be prepared to feel depressed or motivated to become the gavel of justice after almost every video.
Ah yes. That dolphin game.
No that game has 2 "C"s
Still pronounced Ecco.
Dontrel the Dolphin
@@thecoolcario9048 the Atlantic and Specific?
was just listening to eccojams vol 1 by opn
This feels like a game made by a 3D modeller rather than an actual level designer.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if every single one of those assets is purchased from the Unity Engine store or similar. They fit pretty well so they'd have to be part of a pack though.
Like there's what, a dozen or couple dozen environmental assets shown throughout the palace sections in the video? Meanwhile Unreal Engine 5 is coming out with hundreds of high-quality free assets bundled with it.
This is peak "small team AAA visuals" game design. It just needed a better designer.
It's a real shame the game turned out like this, because the palace is genuinely an interesting place I'd like to explore.
@@tukkek The fact that it's this palace with no actual reason suggests strongly that this is an asset flip. Disappointing.
@@fnhatic6694 If you think this game with uniquely original gameplay is an asset-flip, you don't understand what the term means. Not to mention multiple voice actors...
"I'd rather have blockier graphics but a clean image"
Thank you Ross, thank you. This is a message I hope will be taken by developers.
Deep Rock Galactic is the only game I know of with recent games. It really seems like a lost principle.
I've been on a STALKER kick and I feel like all of those games are the antithesis of what you said
@@bigdaddydons6241stalker looks pretty good even today, what are you on about
@@PoliPantev they're great looking games but to me at least that from the lighting the graphics are muddy as hell on vanilla
@@bigdaddydons6241 thats what eastern europe looks like mate :D
It never clearly explains to you the ACTUAL way the repeat mechanic works. It records your actions when it's lit, then goes black, and now the DG's will adopt those actions. BUT, they forget those same actions during the next cycle. However, a cycle will only occur once enough actions have been taken. So the ideal strategy is legit, do your best to stealth while lit, only taking rash actions when you absolutely have to, black out, go guns blazing and try to get as much done. Repeat. But I legit had to Google/Wiki it back when I played because I too had NO idea and was just getting increasingly frustrated.
That was all very clearly explained by the time you leave the introductory levels. There is a part where En notices the echoes can't walk through water, then you walk through water, then next cycle they can walk through water. In the next level, they can't walk through water again, and En literally says something like "they also *unlearn* things that I don't do" to London.
@@williammanning7207 you missed the point of his comment
He wanst talking that the game doesnt explain the learn vs unlearn mechanics
What he was pointing out is how the blackouts are not in a timer but are tied to the actions you take wich the game doesnt explain
Ah, a new Game Dungeon. Now things are starting to make sense. More later. Happy Memorial Day.
Welcome back!
The joke never gets old.
Glad to have you back, Admiral!
o7
How things are going for you, admiral?
This game's story is an english teacher's dream. The enemy is yourself, the dialogue is verbose yet vague, and the main characters overanalyze an inanimate object!
yeah, then you have write an essay and get everyone gets an F.
Reminds me of that time I've read Stepan Chapman's The Troika.
Hell yeah, shit’s dope
Upon careful examination of this post I have reached the conclusion that I channel strong English professor vibes. Coincidentally, I found Echo to be a thoroughly enjoyable game and its story was, whilst not superb, adequate.
Hey, before I went to rehab, I might have found this a really evocative metaphor for my life.
You know, you manage to solve some of your problems, but then a black-out happens, and suddenly you have a bunch more problems again.
I feel like the blackout leading to enemy respawns thing could make for a decent stressfull horror *section* in a game. Not a entire game.
Depends imo. Having your screen go black too much can be immersion breaking... not having anything to focus your eyes on can remind you that youre looking at a screen.
Also, its a really bad idea to have those bright rooms and then go black. That contrast is eye strain inducing.
@@termitreter6545 Oh it would definitly need some work. But i think the basic idea has some potential.
Or at least have some warning it is going to happen.
Like her going; "No... not again." As lights start to slowly dim.
Or give limited amount of items to stave it off.
Honestly the blackouts where nice when you are being hunted by a mob, it just means you can escape quite easy. It's not as bad as Ross tries to be.
@@termitreter6545 The real horror is seeing your own greasy face reflected in the black screen
Whenever I feel sad or wanna go to bed I put on Ross's Game Dungeon. The tangents and reviews and common sense approach to analysis really just makes me feel a little less insane. Thanks dude your an hero!
I fall asleep while a ross s game dungeon is running
(an hero actually means someone who committed or is going to commit suicide)
^What he said.
00:00 Intro.
00:53 Main menu.
01:22 Start of the game.
04:22 Landing and Icy Gieger Tech part.
06:27 "why don't we shoot it" part and rant about UE4 stability.
07:17 The Palace love moment.
11:32 Flickering lights and blackout rant #1
12:24 Copies mechanics and main gameplay loop explained.
20:35 Blackout rant #2
23:22 Lore reveal #1 (obvious Ross's cults segway), also plot delivery rant.
27:45 Music in the game.
29:10 Soul cube love moment, also soul cubes rating part.
31:23 Losing the cube, plot twist #1 reveal.
33:21 Gold level love moment, also antialiasing rant.
36:10 Plot twist #2 reveal and story rant.
38:15 Game ending.
39:13 Ross's story rant #2
40:07 Conclusion. Possible solutions for fixing the game.
42:30 Credits.
I do the same, I have a few channels like this to which I let run and sleep
Also with some cartoons
A missed opportunity:
“Alright, awards time! First award...”
*BLACKOUT*
He stopped the awards for some fucking reason...
I think he said before that he's only giving awards to games he thinks really deserve them
@@benbot0733 No, he started giving awards 2-3 episodes into this and has been doing it for every single game up until 2 episodes ago. I actually remember even the first episodes had "awards" but he was like "I give this game a rating of 3 reeses peanut butter cups" or something
@@MrSHURIKENCHO Both of you are right. He is now retiring the awards unless the game really deserves it.
@@MrSHURIKENCHO better unsubscribe then
I remember that flash game you were talking about. With the song and everything. Just wanted to confirm you're not crazy
I feel like this game's start is At The Mountains of Madness turning into 2001: A Space Odyssey more so than H.R. Geiger.
Yup, the palace looks like an homage to Kubrik's 2001 final scenes.
"I would rather have blockier graphics but a clean image."
They hated video game Jesus because he spoke the truth
video game jesus is a great name
That's why I'm so disappointed with the direction games are going, shooting for better and better graphics but never optimizing or improving anything else. Imagine what game systems or AI would be like if the industry was competing over those. Games have become increasingly stagnant over time.
@@unknownuser3926 At the same time, I also hate people forcing developers to have a stylized artstyle that's opposite to their vision.
I can stand ANY type of graphics. Retro, stylized, gritty, realistic, cartoony, anything to be honest for as long as it's their vision and not because they were forced because this is trending or this is what the audience or the fans want.
Yeah, they definitely need to optimize their games and improve things that need to be improved on their Game Engine. I may expect some games that have those problems to run well in like a decade unless it's Engine related, but that's just me. However, these problems are getting too complicated that the audience and gamers do not nor fully understand or don't really like to understand.
@@Nevermore2790 I have no idea why, but this reminded me that I really need to play Disco Elysium, after I stop playing the Yakuza games lol.
Oh and only now am I learning about the Final Cut controversy, weird games can get lost media just by patches if the dev thinks it's for the best.
I feel like this game would have been much better had they added 1 simple feature--places where you can stash the cube safely, thus making the enemies not attack you. Make it so you can only accomplish the objectives with the cube in hand, but you're giving the player the option to map out the level first. It helps turn it into much more of a tactics and puzzle game (I'll go through this door and jump this gap, but walk around the water so that once the blackout hits I can cross the water to escape), and also helps out the pacing issues by giving the player some breathing room in places.
If you standardize enemy locations between cycles and give the player some ability to trigger when the blackouts happen (levers to interact with mid-level maybe?) and then you have an interesting and really novel puzzle game that would be worth checking out.
I thought they'd be doing the exact same thing. Also, making the frequency of the blackouts RANDOM was just abysmally stupid idea, turning any opportunity to use their core mechanic in a sensible way into tossing dice and hoping for the best.
@@TheRenofox nah, the blackouts arent random, its much worse - the blackout comes faster if you kill echoes or make recordeable moves, further punishing the player for doing literally anything
@@bukvaQ Sometimes people have a really stupid idea what sounds good on paper. They just don't think it further and try to figure it out how it would work in a computer game.
@@bukvaQ That could still work if they gave you an exact timer and a static amounts of time lost when you kill an echo.
@@michimatsch5862 it's not based on time at all, but on actions. The game gives you a bunch of useless actions to perform (such as playing the piano or hitting a tuning fork) so you can manually speed it up. I think the game requires you to do at least a few useful actions to trigger a blackout, so as to avoid you just making the AI completely useless every third cycle (I don't think Ross mentioned this, but the palace doesn't remember skills forever, only for the next two cycles after seeing you do it).
It's genuinely nowhere near as bad as Ross describes it. You have about ten things you can do to completely protect yourself from the echoes, you just need to make sure you don't teach them all your skills at the same time.
The "it's deep because its vague" curse has stricken movies the past 10 years as well.
My favorite thing about this game is that it introduced me to the concept of basically space elves reimagined as smug AI that are smug because they live for thousands of years during warpless space travel. I find it clever.
If you want more megastructures, look up the comics "BLAME!".
That manga is just pure misery. Some incoherent violence followed by some kind of destruction.
Yeah, i got BLAME! vives from this game too, the gun as well.
Glad I wasn't the only one who picked up on this.
BLAME! was one of the first things I thought of when they were down on the surface.
@@gestaltengine6369 Also, En looks like a miserable goth.
In "BLAME!" everyone looks like a miserable goth, especially the cyborgs…
The designers of Echo might have taken inspiration from "BLAME!" but the author of "BLAME!" took inspiration from Hellraiser's Cenobites.
Incidentally, Kentaro Miura took inspiration from Hellraiser lwhen he created the miserable goth looking God Hand.
Ross amazes me because it’s like he’s a genius but with pure common sense.
Wasn't expecting this! Tried Running Echo a couple years back and it turned my GPU into a Jet Engine. I genuinely thought it was gonna set my Tower on Fire so I never went back to it. No other game on UE4, let alone any game in general, has done something like that.
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 Lol no, my Overclocking days are far behind me, not since I fried 3 prior GPU's in my teens. Can't afford that now that I am living in my own apartment.
@@flippedoutkyrii Just saying, if you have an RTX card, MSI Afterburner has an automatic OC utility now. Won't hit the same highs, but it's super unlikely to break anything.
How much you want to bet there was no LOD optimization and the stuff a hundred meters away is just as high-poly as the versions right next to you?
I'm gonna call this game "Getting over yourself with London, the Paranoid Android"
London sounds less paranoid than he does just cruel.
@@Sewblon Well that's the original joke of sorts - Marvin isn't paranoid either.
"People like this aren't bad, but they're just going to waste your time, because all they do is introspect, even though they're making all this up as they go."
I feel attacked.
I can see a really cool alternative method to the black-out/doppelganger gimmick: no blackouts, but a quick warning before a random shift in colored lighting in the Palace. And for each color, the doppelgangers exhibit a different behavior. Maybe either just different levels of speed/aggression for each color, OR they remember certain behaviors they learn from the player per color. So if it's green when you vault over obstacles, they'll only do that when it's green again. And the colors are either randomized or have an elaborate pattern the player might be able to recognize like in the movie Cube. Or something, I dunno. I see lots of room for more interesting twists on the premise, as it's a really interesting idea having the enemies learn your behaviors between cycles so the player has to keep track of not only the enemies but themself. I dunno how that'd solve the infinite respawn problem though. It seems like the devs were really trying to Do Something with this game, but it ended up like this for whatever myriad reasons I'm sure there are. Awesome vid as always Ross!
Sanitarium has eyes following you around the menu! Thanks for the video Ross!
this game is definitely a prime candidate for that extractable game worlds thing you talked about
look at this place damn
You can easily kill the clones, without triggering a blackout. At one point I killed every clone in a level at the same time.
1. The game has a shove function that eats regenerating stamina. The game also has a melee action, to free yourself from a clone's grasp if you're caught, that eats a separate regenerating stamina from the shove. Both actions eat the same amount of stamina and thus take the same amount of time to replenish. Thus, you can juggle between a shove and a melee indefinitely, because the stamina for one will regenerate while you're using the other.
2. Clones always die if they go over a railing. Doesn't matter how low a railing and it doesn't matter what's on the other side of the railing, it just needs to be a railing.
So, just walk up to a clone and shove it, then start jogging towards a railing. When the clone eventually catches up to you, use a melee to get it off your back, then go back to jogging towards the railing. When the clone catches up to you again, your shove will be ready, so just shove it again. Keep doing this until you reach a railing.
When you get to a railing, start running as close to the railing as you can, so that the clone does the same. Stop and either shove or melee the clone. Once that is done, reposition yourself so the clone is now between you and the railing. As soon as the clone recovers after the shove/melee, simply shove it over and job's done. Clone is now dead, but the game never registers this as a death so it never blacks out and it never lets the clones learn from this.
Reminds me of trick speedrunners use to do accidents in Hitman:BM, when they just push target over the railing, no matter how high it has to fall, it always count as accidental elimination.
4:50 that annoying questioning and aggressive attitude about not liking things was my entire set of colleagues in university. They met everything they didnt understand with this angsty questioning and straight up deny something could ostensibly exist or be possible because they dont understand it. And they get resentful as hell if you bring them around to understanding if they made that initial knee-jerk move and then shortly after ate shit.
The university education system was even tailored to this sort of annoying thought process and i had to think like one of these annoying people to get through the classes.
Where's the awards for this game? That's one of the best parts of your reviews, Ross!
I made some mock-ups of what I feel were fitting:
1st Award - Archeology Dreamhouse. If you wanted to explore a beautiful, opulent infinite palace full of great decorations and designs, then I can't think of something better. It's sort of like the mansions from Black Mirror, just a different style and taken to a more supernatural extreme.
2nd Award - Faulty Lightswitch. The light/dark cycles of this game are easily the most annoying part. Hard to enjoy the game like this, where every minute you're just getting cut off so it can-
3rd Award - Doesn't Respect Your Time. Between the slowing the player down for conversations, the respawning enemies that impede progress, and dying over and over making you restart; the game is just a timesink.
Potential 4th Award - Kiddie Pool Plot. It wants to seem deep and complex and cool like the ocean, but it's just sitting in the backyard with a hose pouring water into a shallow tub.
The Palace is fucking gorgeous.
Kind of reminds me of parts of the castle in Resident Evil 4 at times.
it creeps me the fuck out because it looks almost normal but then its too fractal and perfectly symmetrical and its just too uncanny
I love it for the same reason Ross mentioned. It just looks like an abstract dream that seems perfectly normal to you until you wake up. We need more games with enviroments like that.
Having never heard of this game, it seems like a tech demo that someone decided to flesh out after a positive reception to their proof-of-concept.
Couldn't agree more as far as making the player walk slowly during playable story segments. Not a fan at all of how that particular quirk caught on among certain developers. I get that they don't want to break up the gameplay and then they describe it as "immersive" but just having a skippable cutscene would be a huge improvement over handicapping the player to listen to dialogue for a story they may not care about.
These walking segments are beautiful imo.
It would be better if they spent more time planning so the story part would be the same length as atleast the average speed, I don't like it but I can excuse it disableing run, but this game it makes you go the slowest speed and thats what makes it annoying.
It's not like there are enemies, just let me walk normally while i listen to the story. And there are ways to make the player want to slow down instead of forcing them.
I would like to say that they think this is more "cinematic", but I don't recall many movies where a character is leisurely strolling around talking to a disembodied voice.
there has to be term for slowing down movement but, I call it like yank the chain, or maybe The dog walk. I see this alot and I can't not think this isn't codifed.
For a game made by a bunch of students as their graduation project Echo really looks and plays good. The idea that your actions make your future worse and worse really makes this horror real.
re: genetic requirements: i played this briefly after reading nihei's "blame!" (pronounced blam, incidentally, because japan), where the protagonist's main quest in to find humans with the "terminal gene" (as in command line, not final), that can access the network that runs the world. so i automatically assumed it was this sort of genetical engineering, she needed to have certain genes to be able to access the palace
Was expecting someone to mention BLAME! Great manga!
Yeh, that was my thought as well, considering shes obviously not some super soldier.
Its a common trope to have some genetic key. Heck, Ciri in the Witcher, for example, has a specific combination of genes bred into her to unlock her abilities.
Weird! I found this game shortly after reading BLAME! Too... thought it was a weird coincidence that there was so much media based on mysterious and dizzyingly infinite architecture.
Rip Foster then he is now stuck I guess
@@spacejunk2186 I think foster may actually have full control of the palace now.
Custom awards time:
WORST CLONES EVER
Cloning in general is often a crapshoot. Sometimes they're chill and sometimes they want you dead. On very few occasions will you end up with hundreds of clones who all want you dead, come back to life after being killed, and get better at killing you the more you try to escape them. As cloning goes, this is close to the worst possible scenario.
BUDGET WHERE IT COUNTS
This game didn't have the most highly detailed main character, flashy cutscenes, or a wealth of different enemy types. They spent all their money on the level design, and that was the winning proposition.
MOST SPITEFUL AI
You might think this award would go to AM from I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, but his thing was all about hatred. He exterminated all but five humans, and put those through unimaginable torture. London has to help you, but he makes sure to whine and bitch every step of the way, making the journey as miserable as possible. That's true spite right there.
AM is THE cream of the crop for spiteful AI london is just a whiney powerless bitch, oh sure he can deactivate the gun but that is nothing compared.
Dear god man have you read the horrors AM inflicts?
Blackout award
@@FellowHuman137 Clearly you don't know what spite is. AM is legitimate hatred, which is way different from the petty spite that London excels at.
25:35, this kind of problem absolutely permeates a lot of high budget games these days. At a certain point, the exposition should just be relegated to a cutscene. Since it is technically gameplay and cant be skipped, it makes the player dread doing repeat playthroughs.
I feel like 'games that should be good/enjoyable but aren't for xyz reasons' is whole new genre Ross just cracked open and i cant wait for more.
We love you, never stop making these
"We're off to a weird start here." And this is why I'm always excited for that rare instance you post a NEW Game Dungeon episode!
My favorite soul cube was the Omnicube from Bomberman 64. Nobody even knows what specifically it DOES! It's some kind of MacGuffin is all I got out of it.
It's been TWO YEARS since this one launched? Feels like this one came out months ago...
Spot on about the slow-walking thing. It's infuriating when it can't be skipped at all. Moving slow and taking in the sights/story should ALWAYS be up to the player, now matter how "artistic" your game is supposed to be.
Plague tale games say hello. God it infuriates me
This game feels like what happens when an art designer lies about their credentials to get a job as a game designer, has a large budget and, a really good team that is able to bring their vision to life, but has never done any actual game design in their life before. It has beautiful aesthetics and visuals, and that's about it.
This.
So... Balan Wonderworld?
@@Brunosky_Inc You can at least google Balan Wonderworld. Echo has such a generic title that you can't even do that, not helped by there being a comic and a visual novel by that same name, as well as several other non-mononym games with echo in their title.
This game's name is like if an indie studio named their game 'Sonic', on the offchance that it'll appear when you google the game's name, only to be utter drowned out by other more relevent sonic search results.
This game is kind of a failing on every non-aesthetic level.
@@Detahramet DARK - the computer game :)
Sometimes it's okay, for example you call a game FIRE and the game is about a prehistoric man fighting for survival in a world where still not everybody know fire and the title also means "fire in the soul" what makes us human, generic title with meaning but still borderline simplistic.
In the other hand you name a game like: Zone Savage or Glorious Mess or shit like this and you have a good start.
Sad thing is people can't understand game development is not just about coding or in this case painting, you have to understand games too, and there are many people out there who do understand games, and we living in the information age, basically these people have the option to look for talented people right where they are, in front of their computer.
Something about Unreal Engine's mesh animation makes it really recognizeable.
The story of the game strikes me as the epilogue to an epic journey. The game assumes we know the characters and their relations and motivations. The ending itself looks like the completion to the character arc of En. Maybe it is a transmedia narrative. Like the Halo books, comics and the erotic novels that explain the story of Master Chief, Cortana and the other guys.
It feels really weird to have a game that is super out there like this, yet a basic summay of the mechanics and one trailer is enough to let you know exactly how the game is goig to play out from beginning to end
No way was this actually 42 minutes. You used your time magic to make a 20 minute video appear to be much longer again, didn't you?
One gripe I have about Ross is that he loves to go on drawn-out rants because he's bad at the game or doesn't get the mechanics
Just blackouts to artificially increase the length.
@@sidewinder2716 This could just be that the mechanics aren't explained very well or not at all, I'm personally fine with him talking about his experience, but then there could also be times where mechanics are well-explained, told or demonstrated that he just missed.
@@sidewinder2716 that's what I like about hin
@@sidewinder2716 call me a fanboy or something, but that's part of the charm imo. It's either really insightful, with tons of good ideas, or hilarious with how much he missed. Then again, I generally don't play a huge amount of the games Ross plays, so the likelihood of me noticing if he does something silly is pretty slim, but that's on me. I just enjoy the silly youtube man.
Watched half of this before falling asleep and the other half right after waking up so I got bonus video blackouts everytime I nodded off.
I'm a raging alcoholic, so the blackouts come naturally.
00:00 Intro.
00:53 Main menu.
01:22 Start of the game.
04:22 Landing and Icy Gieger Tech part.
06:27 "why don't we shoot it" part and rant about UE4 stability.
07:17 The Palace love moment.
11:32 Flickering lights and blackout rant #1
12:24 Copies mechanics and main gameplay loop explained.
20:35 Blackout rant #2
23:22 Lore reveal #1 (obvious Ross's cults segway), also plot delivery rant.
27:45 Music in the game.
29:10 Soul cube love moment, also soul cubes rating part.
31:23 Losing the cube, plot twist #1 reveal.
33:21 Gold level love moment, also antialiasing rant.
36:10 Plot twist #2 reveal and story rant.
38:15 Game ending.
39:13 Ross's story rant #2
40:07 Conclusion. Possible solutions for fixing the game.
42:30 Credits.
Dude. You are one of the best down to earth, every-man-style video maker I have ever seen. You're both funny and insightful and every time I drift away and do other things (live life, accomplish things) I will stumble across another one of your videos and am again, memorized by your thoughts and running commentary. Thank you.
The gold level reminds me of the Orokin areas in Warframe a lot. Those have a lot more white and sometimes a bit of cyan blue (and a lot more enemies), but the gold is there.
Ross should be locked in the same dungeon Civvie 11 is in so he has less distractions and we get more videos.
Ross wouldn't take any shit from Axe or Hammer.
Ross would also infect the dungeon with the black mold, but just sentient this time around.
Ross is low-key civvie's uncle
Maybe that's what the message of this game was: Sacrifice yourself (make videos non-stop) for strangers you don't know (the viewers), and once you've burnt yourself out, the strangers wake up and realize the error of their ways, but its too late, they're in an endless space palace with no escape now (The internet).
I remember reviewing this game when it first came out. I really loved the atmosphere and story, though I wasn't great at getting through certain parts without either a minimap or enemy vision.
The end credits music from Rama threw me off since you already used that for the end credits of the actual Rama review; I've rewatched that video more times than I care to count.
I loved this game. Something about it was just so engaging. Constantly being encouraged to use minimal possible force as much as you can so that the clones don't become more lethal in the next cycle
really looks like a game where you could get rid of the enemies and make the infinite palace the enemy, like having parts reorient itself when the blackouts hit, also make the player more nimble
Religious AI is a narrative concept that really gets my imagination worked up
"I, Robot" had a neat twist on the idea. One of the short stories, not the movie.
The enemies learn from what you do only while there is light and only for one cycle: you can shoot them while it's dark or avoid shooting them for one cycle and they'll forget how to shoot
I loved using that window to Sprint and shoot my way through tougher spots. Really adds suspense to the game.
Yeah, he mentioned that in the video.
@@yourgameisstupid he didn't mention the one cycle memory I think, at least not explicitly.
7:07 insanity is doing the exact same thing, over and over again expecting things to change.... unless we're talking about computers.
And that's why computers can drive you mad.
Thank you for the episode Mr.Ross's's' Scott
The couple tune intro is one of the best beginnings to a new video.
I forgot about Echo! It was an interesting experience to be sure. Also, Ross there is a pretty famous character just named N from Pokémon Black and White along with the sequels. I think he might have a real name but I don’t recall the games mentioning it.
Ni-
@@AmalekIsComing gg
@@RabbiHerschel Er?
@@robbievulcan9564 We did it!
Natural Harmonia Gropius. (It is mentioned on the games.)
The architecture of the Palace both frightened and intrigued me. Shit, the entire aesthetic of the game captivated me the fist time I saw it, which is one of the reasons why I come back to it whenever the feeling returns. A dream in one moment, and a nightmare in the next.
You know it's a Game Dungeon video when Ross goes into heavy detail on the various "soul cubes" in other video games and films and explains whether or not they're mysterious, whether or not they use souls, and whether or not each one qualifies cube.
Aeon Flux's fly in the eye-lashes is a reference to "A fly in the ointment". As Aeon is said fly who ruins the villains plans.
Thanks Bennet The Sage
I didn't know that! Thanks!
Wrong. That's how Aeon catches her food and maintains her malnourished figure.
@@teranokitty The first bite really is with the eye.
@@teranokitty She has an above average BMI for the cartoon she inhabits.
This is genuinely one of the best looking games I've ever seen. Not in terms of graphics quality or detail, but its environments are breath taking. Damn.
Yeah I'm imagining some Warhammer 40k game taking place in that immense palace.
Fun fact, one of the first chat bots to pass the Turing test just insulted and cussed at you. Maybe London is descended from that type of AI
Just lately found the channel and it is quickly becoming a favorite. Love having these on in the background while I work. Great stuff man. Very happy I found you.
You're in for a great trip!
This is so bizarre. Half way through the episode I remembered reading about this game in a magazine but if it was released in 2017 I mean... that's well beyond magazine times so maybe it was in development hell for like a decade? I mean if you started trying to build a concept like that with architecture that epic I can see it being a damned difficult feat a decade ago.
Technically not beyond magazine times -- if it went through a normal game cycle, you'd probably have read it in 2015/2016, and some games magazines are still releasing physical copies to this day.
@@LouisAndPillz Yeah, games still rely on marketing. It's not like magazines went the way of newspapers, at least not yet.
That's just the time echo
Ah, a new game dungeon. Now things are beginning to make sense. More later.
The unknown title from Rama is called “human stereo”
Great video. One thing that stood out to me though, is that you disabled the UI ring at the start. Then afterwards you mention that you aren't that good at stealth games and you felt the game wasn't accomodating stealth gameplay. I think you dropped the ball on that one. The UI ring definitely helps alot in determining both the direction and state of awareness of nearby clones. Besides that minor point I really enjoyed the video. Thank you
Spot on with the anti aliasing rant, I feel the same.What a shame.
And with higher and higher resolutions coming, pixel size will get so small we don't need anti-aliasing before they ever manage to start doing it well.
My inner weeb got really excited when I saw you list L from Death Note on your letter-for-name roster. That inner weeb wants to mention that there's a character named "N" in Pokemon.
I think a certain basic level of stealth gameplay skill really changes the flow of Echo. Being fully stealthy doesn't end up happening, but being able to solve a guard or two or a room before everything goes to hell really helps calibrate the blackout-cycle gameplay. Then it starts to become far more puzzle-like, with management of the available chase-breakers (doors, elevators, waist-high walls, water, even running), making sure you don't give the enemy too many for the next cycle, while using the ones only you have during the current cycle to trivially lose any pursuers.
Also, I would remark that killing the enemies might have actually been a major mistake. Non-lethal solutions leave the guards where you put them, with a little finagling you could even trap them in rooms they couldn't leave if you didn't give them the right skills. Even without trying to actively wrangle them, the nature of being spotted and pursued should lead to enemies being dragged more towards places you've already been, which is wonderful if you want to go to places where you haven't been. Kill them and suddenly they're back to where they were, which is exactly where you don't want them.
Finally: you wake up from blackouts with about a 2 second head start before the enemies become at all aware. Plenty of time to get a free choke-out on the one that was chasing you last time, or disengage if there was more than one. Really led to me appreciating the blackouts, and even being more active at doing recordable things because I think that influenced the cycle timer.
I ran this in 2017 on a 4k monitor, no antialiasing, on a brand new 1080Ti and it was a console masterpiece. It really do have that many pixels, and that game definitely hit above its weight class for what capable hardware there was at the time.
Already seconds in and you do a echo joke.
This is why I love you
En is just crying and going “n-no! I’m cool and know what I was doing since the beginning!”
Damn Ross, right before work? Now I’m gonna spend the whole time wondering just what the hell this is without being able to watch it.
There was a part where you had to sit on a chair and run for a door but many doppelgangers rush you from the door you're supposed to go to. I couldn't get past that point.
By that time, the gimmick had ran out as well, and I stopped.
EDIT: 31:06 yeah... that bit.
The level design has some serious naissance vibes. I love it!
Ah I remember seeing this game a while back and thinking the concept sounds interesting, but had a feeling it wouldn't work that great in practice and passed over it.
Looks like you called it.
This whole concept of a game would make a fun Warframe dungeon.
I was not expecting to see a dark star reference, but boy am I glad its there
17:55 jokes on you its pretty simple to outsmart this game:
- you can do anything you want during the blackouts without them copying you
- echos you take out during the blackout dont respawn in the next rotation
- the echos aggro resets on blackout meaning you can walk behind them and strangle them if they are close to u after immediately after the blackout
- you trigger the blackout by using x ammount of abilities
the game gives you relatively simple routes you can walk through towards your objectives
to sum this up into a strategy: crouching manteling and sprinting as well as piking up objects or interacting with the environment are used to trigger the blackout, while in the light stay sneaky and take out a couple of the echos, once the blackout process starts, use your gun and sprint as well as those white balls to progress as fast as possible and find a good hiding spot before the reset. Also keep those white orbs on your as often as you can, they are a good panic button and cant be used as well as the gun by the echos.
There should also always be a way to stay away from areas with 3 or more echos close together, most intended progression routes only have 2 or 3 of them in the smaller side rooms.
As for objectives surrounded by water, your goal is it to get to the objective during a blackout so they dont have the ability to walk through water in the next rotation, then get the objective and in the next rotation use the water to escape since it doesnt matter if they know how water works after your gone.
shooting is always bad! only use the gun during blackouts bc the two main problems are solved with the blackout:
- they dont learn to shoot
- their aggro resets so they forget that they heard a shot
If you are getting chased by an echo, push it and circle around something like a vase or table, thats usually enough to get behind them if you cant and your close to a black out, bait them until reset and run behind them while they are in their "respawn" animation.
Im sorry I kinda skipped through your vid so no clue if you mentioned it but you also have a ping tool added to your sphere so you can see enemies that are close to you.
usually most echos get to a point where they can safely be taken out without another one seeing you somewhere along their pathing.
there is also a calling funktion to bait echos.
during blackouts or in tight situations you can always use stuff like doors and elevators to get them away from you (there is also that shockwave gun ability but i never had to resort to that).
once the save arches are introduced they also show up on your ping, they act as a more primary target as youll finish whatever objective you have to complete while moving from save arch to save arch.
I kinda feel like too many people say this game is "stupid" or too unfair and difficult just bc they didnt pick up on all the mechanics bc its really more of a puzzle game then a stealth game. It seems that some people just dont really pick up on the intended way of playing it (wich i guess is the devs fault) even tho to me it was relatively obvious to me (and Im kinda stupid myself).
I hope you maybe give this game another chance and try out some of the levels with these tips, if you still feel like its unfair I guess its just not your kind of game.
As for me I genuinely had fun with the game and thought of it as a really unique and well executed mechanic (although I dont wanna know about hard difficulty).
oh and just as an info the devs for echo dissolved in 2019(?) wich is really sad bc I wanted to see more games like Echo.
Its nice to see reviews like yours tho bc you did say that people that are good at stealth might enjoy this game a whole lot more
I liked the gameplay, its very much a divisive game. A game that took risks and paid the price with the devs being dissolved. I also really liked that it was sci-fi outside of the usual sci-fi affaire.
Also since it wasnt mentioned, to anyone that is interested in this game also check out Magnetic Rose. Its an OVA thats part of the Memories collection (1995), and its what inspired the setting.
It feels like Ross misunderstood how he was meant to play the game, went through the whole game like that, and then thought the game sucked. Not that the game isn't at fault for failing to teach him, but still; he is literally going into a game with a huge focus on stealth, running around openly in front of all the enemies, and then complaining that there's constantly enemies chasing him around.
I was very curious about this game, everything Ross showed seemed SUPER interesting and it was disappointing to hear about the gameplay being so lack luster.
After watching a LP though? The gameplay seems, really, really interesting.The echos do learn from what you do but I don't recall Ross talking about it but, they also unlearn what you do.
The revolving gameplay mechanic is:
Anything you do during the day? The echos can learn and mimic you the next cycle.
Anything you do in the dark? The echos don't learn.
The next day they'll be able to do what you taught them.
But the NEXT cycle they'll unlearn it.
Also, the cycles are based on what you do. If you don't move and try not to teach them anything? The game will not progress the cycle, for every action you teach them the timer seems to go down. And they'll learn anything from crouch-walking to vaulting, opening doors, extending bridges, sitting on the thrones, walking through water, shooting, sprinting, carrying orbs that can kill & using them.
Heck, you might be able to teach them to eat the grapes and see if you can get them to eat the inedible ones to kill them.
So it's a risk vs reward system.
The gun is INCREDIBLY powerful, able to kill as many enemies in a row as are lined up. But if you do it during the day? Yeah they shoot at you. But if you do it at night, they don't learn it and you can shoot a bunch of them with 1 shot, sprint to your objective and such.
So you don't have to walk everywhere or not shoot, you just have to weigh what you want to do given the situation.
I haven’t watched any of Ross’ videos in like 8 months and I finally got a bunch to catch up on 🤩
Thanks once more for showing us these hidden gems Ross, old and new. I had no clue It existed, so it looks they y took a cut on the marketing.
If only they had half the passion for gameplay testing as they have for lush Escher-style palaces, it could be a nish legend.
Boy that bit about the mirror guy in Prince of Persia took me back some. I remember as I kid I used to have dreams about the mirror guy and essentially mirror worlds. I used to think that maybe we can't climb through mirrors is because our mirror selves was pushing back, you know because if you push on a mirror your hand and your mirror images hand pressed against each other. I used to spend hours daydreaming about mirror land and the entire concept of mirror people just because of that small little thing they did in an old-ass Dos game.
I love your videos Ross, I've been watching you ever since I was like 8 with my dad, we used to watch freemans mind together. Thank you for all the years of laughs.
In a Peter F Hamilton novel there are people that spread a single consciousness across multiple bodies. Not a collective consciousness, but an individual who is simultaneously existing in multiple brains at a time. It was really cool because it seems like the ultimate way to live. The guy had a few of his bodies that had jobs to pay for the rest of himself to do whatever. He'd be at home playing video games in one body while another was out partying etc. And if a body has an accident somewhere and dies it doesn't matter, nothing is lost.
I love these videos because of Ross' tangents about 100 different topics.
I don't know Ross, after having played the game for around 2:30 hours myself (I'm around the green palace area now) I found the stealth and enemy learning mechanics quite engaging and enjoyable.
I really like toying around with the AI, seeing what they would learn and how they would implements my actions.
That being said I can easily see why some would not, it's a very slow and methodical game, most of the time you need to move slowly and plan around what you are willing to risk teaching the AI the for the next Blackout.
truth. I hate to say it, but he played the game the hard way.
Pokemon has a character named N if you're still shopping for that slot. Pretty prominent little dude to, questions the entire premise of "dogfighting with monsters," that the franchise has going on. Spends his game as essentially your main antagonist/rival figure while the real big bad manipulates him.
I forgot to leave a comment for the YT-algorithm. This video deserves more views, but so do the rest of your content too. Life is unfair - luckily it's short.
This looked and seemed amazing until the clones showed up. And then the story ended up being boring 2deep4u stuff, and I normally like this kind of story but this just seemed so thin.
There is a game called Naissance which seems similar in feel to the beginning of Echo. The difference is that it replaces unfeeling baroque architecture with unfeeling industrial architecture. In any case, both Echo and Naissance seem to be taking cues from Blame! manga.
this game seems to be among the ever growing pantheon of "would have been better as a movie instead"
or a walking simulator
It would've been a boring movie though
@@aprofondir What a coincidence! It's a boring game too!
@@innoclarke7435 There's a way to kill everything, without triggering a reset. Once you figure out how to do that, the game actually starts to feel more like a slasher flick, where you lure unsuspecting victims away from their friends, to then never be seen again.
> what genetic traits you should need to exlore an abandoned space palace? I can be an explorer too.
> Thirty minutes later: OH NO MY GOD THEY'RE COMING FOR ME ARRRGHHH
apparently being fluid, not counting on your last method working again and being able to solve problems on the fly all are traits that Resourceful cultist should posess.
Life isn't complete without Ross's Game Dungeon!
Wow, I had not made that connection but yeah the endless building and unknowable machines trying to kill everyone while a lone figure tries to survive definitely has some Blame! vibes. The gun too. I was just watching a video on liminal spaces and The Backroom and they brought up Blame! Which made me think of this game and the infinite architecture.
Damn dark places in games where you can't see anything is one of my biggest pet peeves. Some artist spent weeks modelling everything but you can't see it because "the lights are off." If I had wanted to not see the damn game I am playing I'd try playing it with my monitor off.
Man... I don't know about anyone else, but everything about that story is a gigantic letdown to me. There was so much cool stuff you could do with literally fighting yourself. Could have a lot of psychological and introspective significance. Instead it's about reviving a cube dad. Just... geez.
hell they don't even seem to have an actua explanation for what's going on with the clones and palace and stuff beyond some random theory the protag voices that....has no actual evidence to it.
There's a Kingdom Hearts game that does that. It was meant to be a tutorial for KH3 but ended up being its own little thing. Without spoiling too much, you play as a woman descending into suicidal depression as her negative thoughts play in the background, and she fights herself several times. There's even an infinite palace thing like at 9:10. The bleak feeling is definitely intensified by the total lack of any non-hostile NPCs and the setting of destroyed Disney settings floating in a black void.
@@jorymo4964 what game is it?
@@PALACIO254 0.2
I remember seeing the trailer for this game and being really excited for it. This explains why I never heard anything about it afterwards :/ Major props for powering through this, though, it’s gorgeous despite its many flaws.